LeoVegas handed £600,000 penalty for marketing and self-exclusion failings

LeoVegas has been handed a £600,000 financial penalty by the UK Gambling Commission for “misleading advertising” and self-exclusion failings, it was announced today.

The UK gambling regulator this morning said the Stockholm-listed operator, and its affiliates, had been found to have used 41 misleading adverts between April 2017 and January 2018, while the firm had also failed to return funds to 11,205 customers who had self-excluded.

In addition, LeoVegas was judged to have sent marketing material to 1,894 people who had previously self-excluded and had allowed 413 previously self-excluded customers to gamble without speaking to those customers first or applying a 24-hour cooling off period before allowing them to gamble.

The Gambling Commission’s new chief executive, Neil McArthur, urged other operators to “learn the lessons” from LeoVegas’ financial penalty and other cases led by the regulator in recent months.

“The outcome of this case should leave no one in any doubt that we will be tough with licence holders who mislead consumers or fail to meet the standards we set in our licence conditions and codes of practice,” he said.

“We want operators to learn the lessons from our investigations and use those lessons to raise standards,” McArthur added.

The UK regulator said that after reviewing the Malta-based operator’s licence, LeoVegas had agreed to pay the six-figure financial penalty, divest itself of all funds received as a result of the failings and to pay the Gambling Commission’s costs.

The full public statement by the Gambling Commission can be read here.

Today’s announcement comes after EGR Intel recently revealed the UK’s national online self-exclusion scheme, GAMSTOP, had gone live with a number of operators, which now seems to include LeoVegas, according to the operator’s website.

UK-focused operator Sky Betting & Gaming was also recently handed a £1m financial penalty for self-exclusion failings.